Why did Mick Jagger quit Werner Herzog’s ‘Fitzcarraldo’?
Werner Herzog is notorious for taking his collaborators to the brink, be it the brink of sanity or the brink of physical ability. The production for 1982’s Fitzcarraldo would already have been challenging given the climate and remoteness of the Peruvian Amazon, but it was fraught with far more peril and self-inflicted tribulations than could be blamed on the natural environment. The drama off-screen was even more gripping and deadly than anything in the film, which is really saying something.
Based on a true story, Fitzcarraldo stars Klaus Kinski as a rubber baron who tries to transport a steamship over the Andes. Several indigenous crew members died while working on the movie due to the dangerous conditions, and several other crew members were severely injured in two plane crashes. One of them was paralysed. When another crew member was bitten by a poisonous snake on set, he amputated his own leg with a chainsaw.
Given this context, it’s reasonable to assume that any actor would have avoided this film like the plague, but when Herzog approached Mick Jagger to play Wilbur, Fitzcarraldo’s assistant, the rock star had no reason to suspect that it would be a disastrous endeavour. He accepted the offer, and everything was full steam ahead, so to speak.
However, when shooting got underway, the actor who had been cast as Fitzcarraldo, Jason Robards, got sick with dysentery, which halted production. As time wore on, Herzog was forced to consider other actors to replace him, but he didn’t manage to do it quickly enough. Jagger was a very busy man, and there were bigger endeavours on his schedule, specifically The Rolling Stones’ 1981 US tour. He dropped out, and Herzog was so devastated that he didn’t even bother searching for a replacement. Instead, he simply wrote the character out of the script.
The director still has strong feelings about the rock star. In a 2012 interview with German Playboy, he said, “Jagger is a tragic gap in the history of film. He hasn’t been praised enough as someone who could have been a great actor.” Sadly, we’ll never know what he would have made of Fitzcarraldo, though it’s likely that he himself feels pretty good about missing the trainwreck of a production completely by accident.
Who was the first choice for the lead role in ‘Fitzcarraldo’?
The whole reason we lost out on the chance to see Jagger in a Herzog film is that Jason Robards got violently ill during the first part of the production. The actor, who was nearing 60 at the time, had already won two Oscars, one for All the President’s Men and the other for Julia. He was a charismatic character actor who would have made a fascinating turn as the titular rubber baron, but nearly halfway through filming, he became so ill that he was forced to return home, and his doctors refused to let him go back to work on the movie.
Herzog briefly considered casting Jack Nicholson in the role but decided against it. Instead, against his better judgment, he cast Klaus Kinski, an actor he had worked with three times before and with whom he had a very tense relationship. Their collaboration on Fitzcarraldo was as fraught as ever. Kinski was aggressive with the cast and crew, and someone even threatened to kill him at one point.
The film is one of Herzog’s best, but it would likely have been just as breathtaking if Robards or even Nicholson had been in Kinski’s shoes. The crew would almost certainly have preferred it that way.
